The Most Time Saving Firefox Features - Website Shortcuts

We share the two most useful and time saving features in Firefox that will help you access (and search) your favorite sites quickly using abbreviations.

Abbreviate your Favorite Websites

You probably have over a dozen websites in your bookmarks that you visit several times in a day. It could be Google News, The New York Times, your bank, your web email, and so on.

How do you visit your favorite websites - you either have them stored in the bookmarks folder or you remember their URLs and just type it directly in the browser address bar.

Here's an alternative. Open any website in Firefox that you love and press Ctrl+D to bookmark the site. Now scroll to that website name in Firefox Bookmarks menu, right click and select Properties. Type any text in the Keyword field and click OK [I use di for Digital Inspiration, ad for Google Adsense website, etc.]

The next time you type that abbreviation in the Firefox address bar, you'll automatically be taken to the underlying website.

Create Shortcuts for your Favorite Search Engines

Agree that Google is your favorite web search engine but that's not the only place you go to search, right? For instance, you may be using Truveo for video search, Flickr for photos, and Google News for searching the newspaper articles and old archives.

Let's take the case of Flickr - you can search for pictures on Flickr by either using the search box on Flickr.com website or by adding Flickr search plugin to the Firefox search bar. There's a third option that's even better - smart keywords which allow you to search any website using the Firefox address bar.

To illustrate - open the Flickr website, click inside the search box that's in the right corner of the Flickr webpage and select "Add a Keyword for this search." Type an alphabet or phrase that you can easily associate with Flickr (I use flickr). Click OK to close the box.

Now point your cursor to the the Firefox Location Bar (Ctrl+L) and type "flickr your_query" - Firefox will automatically execute the search on Flickr without you having to visit the site.

You can search search keywords for your favorite blogs, online shopping stores, internet forums and even secure sites that require a login (like Facebook). A big time saver.

More Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

And here's a quick screencast video that explains some very useful Firefox Keyboard shortcuts: